3 Steps to Extinguish Unwanted Behaviors!
Susan McLeod
The key is to focus your energy, reaction and relationship on what your child is doing right, and like a fire starved of oxygen, unwanted behaviors will simply extinguish themselves.
By Susan McLeod 
Sometimes the best intentions can lead to the worst outcomes. That’s the case with the most common course of action parents and other caring adults usually take to help challenging children overcome unwanted behaviors.
The common course of action is attempting to “solve” the problem with focused attention, time, energy and resources. With easier-to-raise children, this might work to some degree. But with challenging children, the typical result is that the unwanted behavior grows into a bigger problem – it happens more often, or more intensely or both. The right intention backfired and produced the exact opposite what was expected and desired.
This unintended result is no mystery. There is an underlying universal law is at work wherein whatever we focus on grows. That might be a child who forgets her homework, or doesn’t wear his glasses, hits first, bites when excited, swears when mad… Problem behaviors are myriad, and our children seem to figure out the ones that irritate us the most. If lying is the No. 1 no-no in your family for generations, the challenging child in that lineage is sure to float some whoppers.
Focusing on the problem fails us and the child
So let’s take an unwanted behavior and follow how the scenario plays out under conventional parenting.
Let’s say a child wets the bed. The first course of action might include buying plastic liners for the bed and limiting liquids before bedtime. This causes tension – the child is thirsty, but he can’t have something to drink because he “might wet the bed.” There is no trust or expectation that the child will grow out of this. The child may feel resentment or like he is a target. The chore of changing the wet bedding might become another adversarial point.
Parents are often advised to wake the child multiple times during the night and get him to the bathroom to urinate in efforts to avoid an accident. Now the whole family’s sleep is disrupted.
Parents are also advised to track the patterns of wetting – when, what happened prior, and to adjust the waking times to precede them. They are advised to purchase a bedwetting alarm that is attached to the child’s underwear to detect moisture. When the alarm sounds, the parents are to wake the child to visit the bathroom. Then reattach the alarm. The parents are also advised to put the child in pull-up diapers.
In a short time, bedwetting has become a huge focus in the life of this family. And even if unintended, it has also become the focal point of who the child is: “I am a bedwetter.” The child may not be aware that he is anything other than his unwanted behavior.
Eventually the vast majority of children will outgrow the physical problem of bedwetting, but perhaps not so easily the effects on his self image or the relationship with his parents and peers.
Focusing on the child’s strengths changes everything to positivity & success
There is a shorter, more effective route to extinguish unwanted behaviors and boost the child’s self image at the same time. It is the Nurtured Heart Approach(TM) created by Howard Glasser, and it’s a 180-degree turn about from the conventional model.
Glasser’s approach isn’t designed for problem behaviors, but for highly challenging children. If the Tucson-based therapist was still in private practice and you called for an appointment to cure bedwetting, you would likely hear him say, “You can’t engage me to fix that problem, but I guarantee you, if you engage me to teach you how to nurture a strong relationship with your child, the bedwetting will stop as a natural outflow of getting the energy of the relationship going in the right direction.”
Glasser’s approach requires that parents not talk about the unwanted behavior. Instead, the approach applies a whole-child intervention that includes recognizing, appreciating and supporting who the child is, which is much more than any unwanted behavior, be it bedwetting, tantrum-throwing, swearing, lying, substance abuse and so on.
Based on Glasser’s book, “Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach,” here is a 3-Step Formula to extinguish unwanted behaviors.
Step 1: Energize the whole child, and everything that’s going right.
No one is a one-dimensional person as defined by an unwanted behavior. So be clear on who your child is as a whole person. ’Energize’ means to apply intention, attention, and lots of emotion and reaction to seeing and saying everything that the child is doing right, everything that supports who your child is at his or her best and the qualities that you want to grow through your focused intention and energizing.
Glasser’s approach includes four distinct types of recognitions to energize success and create a strong relationship between parent and child and rewrite a child’s self image to one that is positive and based on his or her strengths, character and unique giftings. Parents focus on seeing their child anew from a perspective of, “I’m going to become aware of everything my child is doing right and what that says about him or her as a person with great character and values.”
The parent recognizes and appreciates every ounce of effort the child puts forth in keeping the rules, because there is always some level of effort involved; and when a challenging or intense personality is involved, it is usually a huge amount of effort being expended at any given moment to follow the rules, and this effort is rarely ever recognized or appreciated by parents or teachers.
With this approach, the child who is wetting the bed at night hears throughout the day a string of compliments such as how his effort in getting his math assignments completed correctly and handed in on time has paid off with a passing grade, how skilled he is at video games when he reaches a new level, and how responsible he is at looking out for himself and his siblings when he stops short of a potential danger. He hears how he is growing in his ability to handle himself with confidence in stressful situations, such as going to a new class or trying out for a new sport.
The aforementioned are all behaviors that we expect of children, and when children accommodate these expected behaviors, we might say, “Great job” or “thank you.” Contrast that to the amount of reaction, energy and emotion that under conventional parenting the child might receive for breaking a rule, such as being disrespectful, and one sees that children can easily form an impression that they get more intense relationship when things are going wrong. That is the message we want to reverse for challenging children. We want to clearly, thoroughly and continually demonstrate that they get the best from parents and adults when they simply do what’s expected and follow the rules – that we see them and appreciate them for simply being alive, being in our lives and being themselves
Step 2: Recognize and appreciate every moment the unwanted behavior is not happening or that it is happening less.
Parents who have been engaged in conventional modes of problem-solving with a challenging child are usually exhausted and baffled that their efforts are backfiring and making matters worse, and because they are such caring, concerned parents, they try even harder to rectify the situation and to help their children find success. In this crisis mode, and with that level of heightened awareness, parents often feel that a child is “always“ and “only” doing the problem behavior or “never” keeping the rules or doing anything positive.
This is the same universal principle of focused attention at work. When we think (believe, set our intention) that our child is always doing this or never doing that, that is all we can see. Our thoughts, intentions and judgments about the child are programming our brains to be on high alert and look out for only the problem behaviors; and we really do not see anything that our child is doing right.
But the reality is that no child is breaking ALL the rules ALL of the time. That means there is a lot going on for a parent to recognize and appreciate about the child’s efforts.
The child who loses his temper and break things stops at some point. “I appreciate that you’re not breaking anything right now. I know you’re still mad, and that shows me that you are using a lot of self control right now to stop yourself.”
The child who screams and bites eventually has to take a breath. “Look at you, you’re not screaming right now or biting. I know that you are really upset, but look at you being so powerful. You are learning how to handle your strong feelings and not break the rules.” Typically, a challenging child who hears such language while she is on the in-take portion of breathing, perhaps seconds before intending to continue her screaming and biting, will instead have a jaw-dropping experience of feeling seen and appreciated and exhale an incredulous, “I am? Yes, I am!”
To continue the first example of the child who wets the bed. Perhaps one night he wakes while urinating and finishes up in the bathroom. That’s a milestone to be celebrated! “Wow! It’s happening already. You’re starting to feel when you need to go and you’re waking up. Way to grow!” Eventually, a nap or a night will come when the child does not wet the bed. You guessed it, it’s party time.
Step 3: De-energize the unwanted behavior.
‘De-energizing’ means that you pull the power plug on the unwanted behaviors by giving them little or no energy; it means that the parent gives no relationship to the child at the time the unwanted behavior appears. It’s like starving a fire of oxygen, it simply cannot grow and extinguishes itself.
Relationship takes the form of attention, interaction and reaction, so the parent does none of that when the unwanted behavior appears. If the behavior is a broken rule, for example, swearing, the parent says a simple, “Reset,” and moves immediately to back to Step No. 1 by saying as soon as the child stops swearing, “I appreciate that you’re not swearing right now.”
The parent of the child who wets the bed simply does not discuss it, but moves quickly to Step No. 1. Perhaps with a transition of, “I know you’re disappointed, and what I see is that you’re handling that strong feeling really well without breaking any rules. Change the bed and I’ll see you at the breakfast table in 15 minutes.”
Important aspects of de-energizing negativity are that parents do not lecture or provide pep talks at a child’s point of failure. Doing so is the equivalent of telling the child on one hand that it’s not OK to do the unwanted behavior, but with the other hand, you are handing the child $100 bills worth of relationship. In other words, the child is getting your undivided attention, strong emotions and intense eyeball-to-eyeball interaction with you over having a problem. With Glasser’s approach, parenting no longer give a child the prize of their relationship for having problems or breaking rules.
Consider a child who is sad that a parent is often out of town for work. Suddenly the child realizes that all she has to do is act out in school, and bingo, the father’s travel is cut short and he is picking her up from school and talking for hours about how she must straighten up in school because getting a good education is so important to a good life. He might rearrange his whole life to more closely oversee her so that she succeeds in school, only to disappear again when she does get back on track. Smarter is the parent who provides an intense level of connection, emotion and relationship in a proactive and preventive manner when the child is behaving well.
De-energizing negativity is not about withholding relationship as a punishment. In fact, the point is that punishment itself backfires and is not necessary to guide a child to live out his or her greatness. That’s why the disengagement to de-energize negativity lasts only as long as the misbehavior – perhaps only seconds – just long enough for the parent to find a new moment of success to re-engage the child.
Master the principles and techniques in these three steps and you will be able to extinguish unwanted behaviors in your child, and conversely, ignite desired behaviors and good character.
More than that, you will have a strong relationship with your child based on something far more exciting and long-term than a challenging behavior. You will be connecting heart-to-heart with who your amazing son or daughter is at their core being.
